When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I’m still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer’s, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

Egyptian police shot and wounded two Africans, from Mali and Kenya, who tried to slip over Egypt’s desert frontier into Israel on Sunday, security sources said.

Escalating police violence at the Egypt-Israel border has left 11 would-be infiltrators dead since the start of the year, while scores of others, mostly from Africa, have been detained. Police killed an Eritrean migrant at the border on Thursday.

Tyre, Lebanon — Soon after the U.S. destroyer USS Cole was deployed off Lebanon’s shore Feb. 28 to “preserve political stability”, a group of young men gathered around in the embattled agricultural town Qana in south Lebanon, and voiced their fears.

“Everyone feels there is a war coming,” said Salman Ismael, a 22-year-old university student. “Especially after the killing of (Hezbollah commander) Imad Mughniyeh and what is happening in Gaza. And now U.S. ships come to the waters of Lebanon. Israel wants to improve her army in the Middle East after its defeat in 2006, she wants the Arabs to be scared of her.”

Photo: Boy holds a Palestinian flag atop a destroyed building in Gaza.

Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the “Warm Winter” military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home’s windows had fallen onto their bed.

Listen to an interview with Sam Hadeeb from the Popular Committee Against the Siege in Gaza. In the face of ongoing Israeli military actions directed at the Gaza Strip, which have taken the lives of over one-hundred Palestinians within the past week — including children — a popular committee has formed in Gaza, which has been coordinating a series of popular direct actions and appealing for protests lead by social justice movements throughout the world.

GAZA CITY: Two F-16 missiles were all it took to bring down the five-story headquarters of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU).

The Union, established in 1965, is one of the forerunners of the movement calling for an international boycott of Israel, and imposition of sanctions on it until Israel meets its obligations over UN resolutions, borders, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.

Montreal, March 7, 2008: A wide spectrum of community associations, NGO’s and labor unions have united to launch a joint appeal to people across Canada and to government of Canada to call for peace in Palestine.